You Really Can’t Fool Mother Nature

There are times when a woman has to step in for Mother Nature to avoid ending up on the “Don’t” pages of a fashion spread. Usually it’s a minix fix here and there and amounts to no more than Crest White Strips and a box of Miss Clairol hair dye. Then there are those who engage in a tug-of-war with her while she tugs and pulls back because, after all, you can’t really fool her. This is the case with Cindy Jackson, who with fifty-two plastic surgeries has earned a place in the Guinness Book of Records and if nothing else, has written a book about all this and has a $750.00 an hour plastic surgery consultant. Jackson may be vain, but she’s no dummy. She’s also a member of Mensa.

Her quest for the Holy Grail of beauty started with a childhood, where she felt unattractive and unloved, and an inheritance from her father when she was in her early thirties. Fifty-two operations later, there isn’t a part of her body that hasn’t been remolded, re-sculpted or redone. Even the inside of her knees have had some work after she thought they were hitting a little too close when she walked. It might have been a millimeter or two, but it was enough to make her notice and her surgeon to agree. Her latest procedure was on her hands because they were looking a little too weather-beaten as most people’s would at 55.

I wouldn’t have continued tussling with myself like that because you never know when something’s going to come in handy. When it comes to my hands, for example, I’d start wondering what would happen if I needed a transfusion and the doctor had trouble finding a vein underneath all those injections and collagen. But maybe I’m not someone to ask because I’m always ready for an emergency and have bought just about every insurance on the market, including an organ transplant policy, that I’ll get a refund on if I keep everything, and heath insurance for my dogs.

Either way, had that been me, I would have skipped most of those surgeries and gone for therapy instead. It probably would have cost about the same, and there would have been no time inside a recovery room.

Maybe that’s why one of the most memorable people I ever met was someone who had gray hair at twenty and was okay with that. Her outlook on life was that every line, gray hair and every wrinkle were like metals of honor for a life well lived.

Another one is a grandmother whose salt and pepper hair is always perfectly coiffed, whose knit pantsuits always match and who adorns every outfit with jewelry and her face with just the right amount of make up. She carries herself with such grace and dignity, she almost makes others look forward to aging, if only they could be like her.

Besides, even the best plastic surgeons can’t undo the crapshoot called genetics. The best they can usually do is try for passable or attractive if the bone structure isn’t there to begin with. Take supermodel Laetitia Casta who is so beautiful that someone once said that looking her could make anyone believe in a Supreme Being. In her case, it’s as if the celestial beings lined up and bestowed heaping measures of gorgeousness and otherworldliness on her. The late Elizabeth Taylor also fell in that category.

I’m of the club that I want to hold onto my looks as long as I can, but I’ll have to have been swiped over the head with a two-by-four before getting fifty-two procedures. In the end, I want to be somewhere between the woman with the wrinkles and the grandmother with the grace and dignity. Though underneath it all, they really are one and the same.